> "The competition has millions of man-hours invested". Who cares? On a day-to-day basis I execute maybe 3% of the code paths in my editor
This is the Microsoft Office argument and the problem is that no one uses the same 3%. If they did, sure it'd be "dead simple", by that of course I mean take many, many years of work. Sublime which attempts to do far less than we wanted to took 5 years to get to today and I'm not sure it really is a commercial success capable of supporting 3+ people.
> "Programmers don't pay for software". I'm sorry, but this is a poor excuse
It's far from an excuse, it's the truth. It doesn't matter if developers as a class have a lot of money. They don't actually spend it. I don't know a single person who has ever personally paid for Visual Studio. Github is a service and the vast majority of their money comes from companies not individuals. How many people run stuff only on the heroku free tier?
Or here's a direct example: when we launched the kickstarter people \freaked\ out about us pricing it at $50. We had to drop it all the way to $15 and folks still complained endlessly about it. It is well known that short of a service targeted at companies, it is near impossible to sell developer tools. After all, it's a group of people who look at a piece of software and say "I can build that".
If there's some secret, we're missing it. There's an entire organization [0] that has grown up around trying to help dev focused companies figure this stuff out. It's led by James Lindenbaum (co-founder of Heroku, invested in us), he knows his stuff and he couldn't figure out a way to make this work out either.
[0]: http://heavybit.com/